Opponents Claim Playa Vista Site Is Leaking Methane 

Photo by Carolanne Sudderth

Carolanne Sudderth

Mirror Staff Writer

   In August, the wetlands in back of Titmouse Park are still awash in marine haze at ten in the morning -- not quite a fog, but a mist that fades distant objects to an opalescent white. The morning was hoarse with the cries of birds. The multi-syllabic call of the meadow lark that took me back to my childhood on the bluffs mixed with raucous cries that were strange to me -- a two-stroke call of something large and winged. 
   In that muted light, I walked down a narrow meandering path carpeted with soft yellow grass to the birding platform that has been built across the old Pacific Red Car berm. The pilings in the stream are the remains of the bridge across which the electric cars rattled. 
   When I hit the platform, I startled three great blue herons. The flattened double arch of their wing span must have been six feet across. They rose in circles, their paths intersecting each other as they spiraled upward -- like intersecting ripples in the air. 
   It’s hard to believe that this bucolic area is a battleground, but it is. 
For 20 years, the undeveloped area around Ballona Creek, south of Marina del Rey, has excited lawsuits, demonstrations hunger strikes, and rivers of vitriol as developers and politicians, union leaders and business leaders and various environmental groups have at each other. 
   Both developers and conservationists want to maintain the area’s tranquillity, but the developers want to make what amounts to a mini-city on the site and the conservationists want to preserve the wetlands as they are. 

Photo by Carolanne Sudderth
   The 1087-acre parcel lies between the Marina and Los Angeles International Airport and is bisected by Lincoln Boulevard as it sweeps up to the Westchester bluff. It’s said to be the largest undeveloped site in the Los Angeles area.
   The proposed Playa Vista development include 13,000 residential units, five million square feet of commercial space and an entertainment technology “campus.” DreamWorks, SKG was expected to build a new studio there, but since it has pulled out, Playa Vista officials are looking for another studio to replace it. 
   Conservationists argue that wetlands in general, are disappearing and that in Southern California, 95% of them are gone. Once the dominant ecosystem in the Los Angeles basin, over the years, wetlands have been drained for residential, commercial and agricultural use. (La Cienega means “the marshes.”) In addition, they say, those 13,000 housing units would hold 29,000 people and that combined, with the 20,000 anticipated jobs would bring almost an additional 50,000 people to the area. Per the Master Plan Draft Environmental Impact Report prepared by Playa Vista for the City of Los Angeles, those 50,000 people would make 200,000 car trips per day (in addition to the 177,000 that head for the airport daily) which would produce an additional ten tons of air pollution per day. 
   The latest volley to be fired across the bow in the battle for Ballona consists of claims that Playa Vista is chock-full of methane, the flammable, combustible gas that put Belmont School on the map and causes land-fill lawns to burn with a low-blue flame.
   Activists allege that Playa Vista may be another Belmont waiting to happen and are calling for additional studies on the land. Kathy Knight, Wetlands Coordinator for the Spirit of the Sage Council, says that the thing they haven’t tested for is the presence of carcinogenic gases that are often found with methane when it occurs underground, such as benzene, toluene, xylene, and hydrogen sulfide.
   The charge is not a new one. Ten years ago, Margeurite Boster broached the question on behalf of the Playa del Rey Bluffs Association in a letter to the Los Angeles City Council. Then- Mayor Tom Bradley wrote, “The concerns you expressed over potential safety and health effects from benzene emissions are very understandable. “ Acknowledging benzene as a known carcinogen, he instructed staff to look into the issue of “methane and other hazards from abandoned wells.”
   Grass Roots Coalition founder Patricia McPherson said she has been trying to bring the matter to the Council’s attention since 1993, when she noticed gas bubbling up from the earthen bottom of Ballona Creek. McPherson initiated the activity to Save All of Ballona Wetlands with the Sierra Club after the Friends of Ballona suggested she start her own group. 
   One of the long-time users of the wetland is the Southern California Gas Company which has been storing natural gas on the bluffs for many years. McPherson discovered corporate reports from the 1950s indicating that millions of cubic feet of gas had disappeared. She guestioned people familiar with hazardous gas mitigation, “professors at USC literally wooed around the world for their expertise, and they told me to look for bubbles.
   “And I saw bubbles.”
   “From one of the spots, it took three minutes to fill a liter jar. That’s an enormous volume of gas coming up.”
   McPherson’s advisors told her how to take a sample. “We followed the instructions and sent it back and they analyzed it. [They’re the ones] that characterized it as thermogenic gas.”
   Biogenic methane is produced by decomposing organisms. Thermogenic, or petrogenic gas seeps up from deep underground. According to McPherson’s advisors, thermogenic methane is almost always accompanied by hydrogen sulfide, toluene and xylene all of which are known carcinogens 
   “Can you give me an instance where this wasn’t the case?” McPherson asked. The couldn’t. 
   Methane levels were cited at as much as 84%
   “What you have in a gas pipe is 90%,” McPherson said. “So what you [effectively] have [in the wetlands] is an open pipeline.”
   In the1920s and 30s, Venice, Ballona and Playa del Rey were as heavily drilled as El Segundo is today. Photographs taken as late as 1947 show the area around the Ballona Lagoon spiked with derricks. 
   “Most of the wetlands that were left, thank god, they were oil fields, because that’s the reason they’re left.”
   In the Belmont case, the gases have seeped to the surface of the uptilted rock strata. On the other hand, an uncapped oil well can permit gases trapped in bedrock more than a mile deep to escape to the surface.
   “In the land use plan for this area, it states that the wells will be re-evaluated prior to construction. That has never happened. The developer never provided the well records in the EIR records.”
There was a summary, she said, “but there should be a 10-page report on each well.”
   McPherson alleges that Playa Capital may have known about the problem. She says that she found a report commissioned by the corporation in 1997 at the Water Board. It indicated methane.
   She found the report in 1999. Officials at the Water Board told her that they had “only just received the report.”
   Additional studies were done by Camp, Dresser and McKendrick in 1999 at the request of Playa Capital. They confirmed the 84% figure.
   McPherson said that Playa Capital Vice-President David Herbst admitted that there was a methane problem to the CDLAC (California Debt Allocation Committee), adding that there is methane all over Los Angeles.”
   McPherson disagreed. “Number one, that’s not true. Number two, that so grossly oversimplifies the issue. That comment shows his arrogance, but it perfectly demonstrates Playa Capital’s reckless indifference to the truth.”
   “They have responded that this is natural. This isn’t a natural setting. This is a man-created condition from working and abandoned wells.”
   She also expressed concern that the presence of other gases was not being addressed.
   Knight agreed, “It’s sort of like there’s an open pipe coming out. The thing that they haven’t tested for is the benzene, toluene and xylene. 
   She said she’d like to see the process opened up. “There could be an open hearing saying, ‘This is what you need to study instead of individual people writing letters. There needs to be an open public process going on.” 
   “They may not put the probes in long enough. They may not put them deep enough. And, as far as I know, they haven’t done them in a way that satisfies the Department of Building and Safety.”
   In describing the environmental hazards of urban oil field operations, Knight cited the Environmental Protection Agency’s April 1998 document, “Carcinogenic effects of benzene: an update,” which “reconfirms that benzene is a known human carcinogen by all routes of human exposure.”
   Knight asked, “Why isn’t a full investigation being done of this site considering the huge amount of taxpayer subsidies that are being asked to support this development like the public hearings that finally held on the Belmont site. There’s no question about it. A full Subsequent Environmental Impact Report needs to be done on the Playa vista site so that the public and other government agencies have an opportunity to review all this new information that has come forth recently and be able to comment on it.”
   Recently, Los Angeles City Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg did mandate that reports be filed with The Department of Building and Safety before construction moneys are released.
   “The problem is the Department of Building and Safety only deals with methane, not with benzene, toluene, and xylene,” Knight said. “That won’t work.”
   David Herbst, vice-president of Playa Capital, told the Mirror that he saw it as a methane issue exclusively and that the methane was naturally occurring. “In October of last year, we issued a news release. It is on our web site (http://www.playavista.com) So we have nothing to hide.” 
   “I do not respond to Patty McPherson’s quote, unquote experts. (She) got up at a City Council meeting and used a bunch of fancy words to try to block the approval of our tract map, and it was approved unanimously by the City Council.” 
   He acknowledged that Playa Vista’s soil contains “some naturally occurring methane, but the amounts are not unusual and the proven straightforward and readily available technique used in the building industry will harmlessly vent any methane.
   “There are methods employed in the industry that we want to use here at Playa Vista and those methods will be approved b y the appropriate city department before any building permit is issued.”